Rich Benjamin

Rich Benjamin is an American cultural critic, anthropologist, and author. Benjamin is known as an author, lecturer and a public intellectual, who has discussed issues on NPR, PBS, CNN and MSNBC. His writing appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian and The New York Review of Books.

Career Benjamin's work focuses on United States politics and culture, democracy, money, high finance, class, Artificial Intelligence, public policy, global cultural transformation, and demographic change.

Benjamin has been contributing essays to The New Yorker since 2017.

Benjamin's book, Searching for Whitopia, was the subject of a TED Talk that has been viewed more than 2.8 million times and been translated into 25 languages. The book has received coverage on NPR and MS NOW.

His scholarly research has received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Brown University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, Benjamin became a Fellow in the literary arts at the Bellagio Center, Rockefeller Foundation in 2020.

In 2021 Benjamin delivered the Poynter Lecture at Yale Law School on "conservatism and Trumpism in the era of digital media—on how right-wing ideology, white fear, and the digital media ecosystem threaten democracy in America."

He serves on the Board of the Authors Guild, the largest, oldest union of writers in the US that fights for authors’ rights, their commercial interests, and free speech.

In 2021, he served as a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Benjamin was in Princeton, NJ in 2023 for his research and teaching post as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University.

In 2023-2024, Benjamin served as a Harvard-Radcliffe Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. There he continued research on his major field of interest, high finance—the social-scientific dimensions of quants, flash trading, hedge funds, extreme wealth, and risk.

Works

Searching For Whitopia Benjamin is the author of two major nonfiction books and numerous essays, reviews, and opinion pieces across prominent U.S. publications. The book earned Editors’ Choice distinctions from Booklist and the American Library Association. The book drew significant critical acclaim, including starred reviews from Publishers Weekly , Kirkus Reviews , and BookPage . The book debuted with interviews of Benjamin on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross , MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber , and BBC World Service

In Spring of 2026 it was announced that Talk to Me was named the Finalist for the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, awarded jointly by the Columbia University School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. “The prize honors works of nonfiction that combine literary grace, serious research, and original reporting,” the committee noted. “This year's finalist was selected from 473 entries by panels drawn from journalism, publishing, and academia.”

In its citation, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize called Talk to Me “a powerful saga… Through it all, Benjamin has skillfully woven an engrossing tale that is simultaneously intimate and global, harrowing and empowering.”

Education

As a doctoral student at Stanford University, Benjamin studied with Professors Tim Lenoir and Terry Winograd, an adviser to the founders of Google. Benjamin received his BA from Wesleyan University in Government and Literature and his PhD from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.